How Albert Einstein’s Child Tamed the Mississippi River

From a mile up in the thick Louisiana summer air, the structure looks so fragile, simply a spidery wisp of a pale-colored highway bridge crossing an expanse of flat-brown river, the waters of the Mississippi brimming on one side and the outflow like slashing white brushstrokes running down on the other. Even closer, from as close as it is safe to go, it still does not look like much, not too different from a thousand other dams.

But this construction, improvidently christened half a century earlier as the Old River Control Structure, is distinctly different, and entrusted with the near impossible: controlling the course of America’s biggest and most important waterway. And yet the Mississippi, with its amply was worthy of track record for stubborn behavior, is with every brand-new day withstanding being managed. The natural world in these parts has been changed significantly in recent decades. The Mississippi is no longer the river it was when engineers initially set out, with the construction of these iron and concrete behemoths, to truss and direct it. At that time, in the 1950 s, there was no talk of environment modification or the results of El Niño or the frequency of giant storms or the deepening of the isobaric gradients of cyclones– all proximate causes of a crisis that is now threatening these important structures.

Yet what was currently clear at that time was that the Mississippi was progressively acquiring in strength and that the slender linking channel between the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya River– the hitherto barely-regarded parallel river into which it has actually long been lured to flow– had in some way to be forcibly battled into submission. If not, if such a channel switch were permitted to occur, it would indicate a death knell for the excellent cities downstream, Baton Rouge and New Orleans especially; it would ruin refineries, sever pipelines, bring down railway bridges, cut off drinking water products, affect electrical distribution. It would have an instant and squashing result on the economies of the United States and, undoubtedly, of the world.

It’s little wonder, then, that it has been for 5 years the specified policy of the United States federal government to prevent this from taking place.

Given that the behavior of an alluvial river can change by the minute, the mathematics involved in making any sort of forecast of its future behavior is powerful, the task Sisyphean. Constructing a barrier that would keep the Mississippi from altering its course required the greatest minds of the time to fix the essence of the problem at hand, the compromise that would avoid disaster. Hydrologists had actually determined that by preserving a split of the downrushing waters– with 70 percent of the circulation going down the Mississippi and 30 allowed to cannonade down into the Atchafalaya– it might simply be possible to avoid a wholesale channel switch. To achieve such a split is where Albert Einstein’s kid– of